Club SPACE

While you were sleeping, people just like you have actually begun to travel into space. We were invited behind Virgin Galactic's velvet rope to meet them, and here is our advice: Get ready, and get in line..

- KLARA GLOWCZEWSKA

Last May I received this text message: “I know it’s been a while. We’re approaching our final space flight with our current spaceship. I thought this could be a great time for you to see the experience we’d talked about!” I had met its sender, Aleanna Crane, head of communications for Virgin Galactic, several years prior.

I read the text with some surprise. Space may be the final frontier of human knowledge, and space tourism the ultimate, rarest, and priciest of travel experiences, but for some time now there has been mucho talk and seemingly little action. Richard Branson, after all, first announced his venture nearly a quarter-century ago. Nearly 20 years later he was telling a reporter, “It would be embarrassing if someone went back over the last 13 years and wrote down all my quotes about when I thought we would be in space.”

Mid-2021, however, signaled a great leap forward. In the span of just three months, the three highestprofile billionaire players in the private space travel world had made come-fly-with-me history. Branson went to space on July 11 on Unity (she made her maiden flight in 2018, but sans civilians). Nine days later Jeff Bezos did the same, on a spaceship built by his company, Blue Origin. And a remotely piloted rocket operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX blasted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in September with four private citizens on board. (Musk himself demurred.)

There was a flurry of excitement—the new space age cometh! Heads of private offices and travel advisors with high-net-worth clients started calling, mentioning a surge of interest in space bookings.

But then…crickets. That was three years ago.